A little bit like Animoto, Stupeflix will create professional looking videos out of your pictures and videos. You can upload a soundtrack and text and it looks like it gives you more control than Animoto. Where Animoto restricts the length of your video in an unpaid version and provides open source music, Stupefix seems not to have that length restriction.(but I'm just doing a preliminary investigation now.) As for music, if you want to use Stupefix, you'll have to upload your own.

You can create special effects, overlay elements and animate text. With all this free in beta testing, I'm hoping it can take care of the laundry too. ...Back later perhaps with some example creation.

According to Wordle, it is "a toy for generating 'word clouds' from text that you provide." I'd suggest that is so much more than a toy. What it does is allow you to see a visual representation of any set of words. In a "Wordle" you can see how frequently words appear in a given text, or see the relationships between column of words and a columns of numbers.

To create your vision of words in Wordle, you can choose fonts, colour combinations and layouts. After you are done, you can print, download or publish your Wordles as long as you note the Wordle URL.

As far as accessing the Wordle gallery, there is a caution. The developer warns that Wordles are not moderated or filtered. As such this may limit its application in K-12. For the rest of us, it's-WORD ON!

Released in May, Blerp wants you to layer the web and say anything anywhere.

Currently in "Alpha" stage, Blerp adds a social network over the entire web turning it into one big interactive forum. There will be community blerps where anyone can participate and user-based blerps created for closed groups.

Sounds intriguing and I can see its application in education; however, right now I'm trying to sign up but I seem to be caught in a perpetual spin. It is in Alpha stage, so I'll try to sign up later..more to follow.UPDATE! I finally was able to sign up to blerp. I'm using a Mac and was on Firefox. It didn't seem to like that so I switched to Safari and bang zoom 0I;m on blerp. I blerped this page, so you can see how it works. Check it out http://www.blerp.com/d/15516?layerUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fcaptainfutureelearning.blogspot.com Add a comment to see if it works and answer the poll.

Have you ever wanted to show a YouTube video in class and wondered if there was some way to have it automatically start at the spot you want? Someone asked me this today. (Thank you Debbie for the Q) Within a minute I had the answer to the question, and it's easy!

OK, let's say I wanted to show one of my course introductions but I wanted to start at the part where I show the class a montage of the commercials we'll be talking about in the class.

First I view my video and determine that I want it to start at 3 minutes and 32 seconds.

Right now, I'm working on my major project for ESPY590 Net. The topic I've chosen is to create an online e-learning survival guide. Maybe I'll do a 'littila thisa and a littla thata' and post some things here too.

As a podcaster myself, I love a good free podcast. I've found the best place to go for just about anything is iTunes.

There are two areas where you can look for content. One is iTunes U where colleges and universities post their podcasts. You can get to iTunes U by opening iTunes and going to the iTunes store. (Don’t worry, if you follow my path you will get to all things free.)

Once you are in the iTunes store, you’ll see a link in the box to the right, click “iTunes U” and browse!

The other alternative is to find open educational podcasts. After opening iTunes, go to the iTunes store. In the left column, you’ll see a link “Podcasts.” Click this link. In the left hand column, you’ll see under the heading CATEGORIES a link to “Education.” Click this link and browse.

Here are a few interesting educational technology podcasts:

(Before clicking subscribe, make sure you have downloaded iTunes for your computer.)

Screencast.ca by Kent Manning is a video podcast that covers topics like using Flickr Creative Commons, Quicktime Pro for video, Camtasia, Picassa and Screencast.SUBSCRIBE To Screencast

E-Learning Insights Edna.edu.au part of Education Network Australia is to provide academics, teachers, and trainers with interviews on leading tools, technologies and issues in e-learningSUBSCRIBE To E-Learning Insights

I was just reading a case concerning a student who in a computer programming course posted his code to the internet. If you are interested in the open access movement, it's worth a read especially the comments of Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing.

Q. What do you call the loss of productivity caused by too much time spent on Facebook?

A. Social Notworking

Cramer-Krasselt, a Chicago-based ad agency has published its Cultural Dictionary The dictionary is published (free!) to educate their clients about their consumer behaviour research and to be relevant.

Areas covered are politics, ethics, the economy, envirnoment, technology, social networking, personalities & realtionships, stress & life, street slang and others. Each section starts out with a short overview of trends in the area.

If you want to author web pages and you don't want to buy a program, try Kompozer

From their web site: "KompoZer is a complete web authoring system that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing.

KompoZer is designed to be extremely easy to use, making it ideal for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking web site without needing to know HTML or web coding."

Checking for plagiarism? Try Plagium by pasting the questionable words in the text box on their site. Free in beta test.

From their site: "Plagium is a service, now in beta test, of Septet Systems Inc. Septet Systems Inc. focuses on the development of innovative information search solutions for consumers, enterprises, government, academics, and healthcare."

Nobody wants to pay anymore. It's about Pull not PushMedia Futurist Gerd Leonhard talks about different types of free:

Free= nobody pays anywhereFeels Like Free= the payment is bundled or hiddenFreemium= all users get real value but some pay for premium sevice (A lot of these new cool ed apps work like this)3rd Party Pays= Someone else pays because they want access to my data

His prediction- Half of all internet users will create and post their own content by 2012The future is open. See Media Futurists Gerd Leonhard's presentation here: